My first experience with dim sum at Yank Sing

I finally broke down and did something I’ve never done before. Or if I did, I can’t remember when I did it. I went to Yank Sing, the one on Stephenson, the street that looks like an alley. It’s a smaller version of the much larger and grander Yank Sing location in Rincon Center.

It was Sunday about noon. I was in a hurry and Sonya Molodetskaya dragged me in. I wanted to go to Subway, but she had other ideas. The place was almost filled. It is clear that people have made reservations because there are reserved signs on the vacant tables. They quickly adjusted and gave us a table for two right next to these young guys. I thought they had been there for a while because they had stacks of the wooden baskets on their table.

As soon as we took our seat, a server came over. I said I’d have white wine and Sonya had a beer. Then we saw the cart in front of us with multiple round baskets with lids, which they would lift the top of one to show us what was inside. There must have been 16 different items on that cart alone, and we selected two or three. Then another cart showed up. It wasn’t more than three minutes before our table was filled with little round baskets, just like the guys next to us.

In my case I wanted the chicken in foil. Everything came in a wrapping and we could eat only with our chopsticks. We also had various pork, beef and shrimp dumplings, then came another cart with lidless baskets filled with deep fried shrimp, spring rolls and other fried foods, all of which came to our table. One of the most interesting dishes was the little soup dumplings that contained about a teaspoon of hot broth inside; they were excellent.

All of this happened within 35 to 40 minutes, so I was back on the streets and happy. I’m now looking forward to my second dim sum experience and see if it’s as good as the first time.